May, 2009

Blog - About

About Contagious Curiosity

I am a DE (Developer Evangelist) for the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) team. My job is to give talks to developers throughout Southern California, to listen to their feedback, and to communicate that feedback back to Redmond. My interests and specialities are as follows:

I am a "language geek" with a degree in linguistics and have a hobby of learning foreign languages. Semantic modeling - both visual and verbal - fascinates me. I love LINQ, SDML, ORM and the like...I mean, really, how many people have you ever met that actually used English Query in SQL Server 7.0?

Sunday before TechEd I represented local evangelists at the TechEd MVP pre-summit. In addition to meeting several MVPs for the first time, I got a chance to plan new events with key SoCal MVPs (most of whom also lead or actively participate in local...

Happy to have led the Women in Technology event at TechEd last week. Asli Bilgin and I have been working with a team at Microsoft to build this event brand for a year now. Microsoft has hosted WomenBuild events across the US and Australia...

The first step in starting to develop on a new platform includes obtaining the software for that platform of course. Before I talk about software though, I am going to talk a bit about hardware. Because I want to develop an application using...

Starting to develop for a new platform means some software setup, I’ll detail what I am using, list possible variants on my configuration and include links to everything so that you can get set up quickly and easily as well. Software needed falls into...

If you have been following this series then you are probably raring to open VS and get coding. I mean, c’mon, we are developers here and that’s what we do, right? Well, yes – eventually. But one last thing before we start that. ...

I know most of you know about CodePlex , but do you use the MSDN Code Gallery ? Both are FREE code repositories – so what is the difference you may ask. From the FAQ: Code Gallery is a community-enabled Web site where you can share developer...

On Saturday after TechEd, I attended the first-ever StepUp Career Conference for underserved high-school aged girls. This event was put on by the national StepUp non-profit, based in Los Angeles and was hosted at the Dermologica HQ in Carson, CA...

So, let’s talk here. When is the last time you developed a Windows application? Yeah, I thought so – me too actually. You’ve probably heard a bit about Windows 7 and might be thinking that it’s time for you to take a look at it. ...

During the day, whenever I could I hung out in the SQL Server Business Intelligence world (another main site – here ) – sessions, floor booth, also I did a book signing for my BI book . I was also fortunate enough to have a long lunch with Gemini...

Well it wouldn’t be TechEd, if there weren’t one or more fun parties to attend, but I have to hand it to our corporate ITPro team this year. Their Windows 7 SpringBoard party at the StandardLA was really great. The atmosphere was great – Stephen...

People ask me ‘how do you keep up?’ Well, sometimes I don’t. I am horribly ‘behind’ in the world of Windows Mobile applications, development, etc…So I decided to spend a bit of time at TechEd trying to remedy that situation. First I attended...

Thursday was community party night at TechEd. In addition to the attendee party, we in SoCal were able to invite around 300 people from the local tech community (who weren’t registered to attend TechEd). It was really cool to see who turned...

A domain specific language for concurrent programming, formerly known as "Maestro", developed by the Parallel Computing Platform team. Watch this Channel9 video to learn more – here . Get the bits and play – here . The MS team...

There are worse problems to have, but a person really needs stamina to keep up with all of the possible tech events in SoCal. I had fun at TechEd, working in the Oslo booth with the team (finally met Don Box in person!), leading the WiT event, attending...

All week at TechEd I worked in the Oslo booth in the SOA area. I worked with Kris Horrocks , Miguel Llopis and Shy Cohen . Kris and Miguel are on the Oslo product team and Shy is an architect and trainer, who recently left Microsoft after...